Aircraft are used to transport passengers and cargo between various locations. Numerous aircraft depart from and arrive at a typical airport every day.
An integrated set of flight operations schedules set departure times and arrival times for flights between airports. For various reasons, however, disruptions affect anticipated arrival and/or departure times for flights. For example, incoming and departing flights may be delayed due to inclement weather. As another example, a flight may be delayed due to a crew delay, such as may be caused by a scheduled flight crew for one particular flight being delayed on a leg of a previous flight. As another example, a departing flight may be delayed due to maintenance issues.
Schedule delays may or may not cause a flight disruption. For example, a four-hour maintenance delay will fit within a maintenance window when a next scheduled departure time for a flight is scheduled to depart eight hours after the original maintenance event. As such, the delay is not considered a flight disruption. A flight operation delay is disruptive if it affects a scheduled arrival or departure time for one or more flights in excess of a disruption threshold limit. As an example, a crew delay of an hour may cause a flight disruption in that it delays a scheduled departure of a flight by a particular amount of time (such as a flight delay of half an hour) that is beyond the disruption threshold limit (such as twelve minutes).
Certain airline and military operators have processes that build substantially-optimized schedules for their aircraft fleets, maintenance, airport gates, and crews. The operational goal is to stay on a particular schedule. As can be appreciated, various events may disrupt the operational goal. Examples of the disrupting events include inclement weather, crew illness, aircraft maintenance issues, crew work schedule rules and requirements, and the like. When a disruption occurs, an operations center attempts to contain the effect of the impact to a single flight by looking at solutions that balance economics, regulatory constraints, and contractual constraints with impacts to customers, cargo, and later flights, for example. As such, operations personnel typically ascertain the impact of the disruption if nothing is done in relation to a schedule recovery plan.
Typically, one or more individuals at an operations center (such as airline operations personnel) analyze numerous delays to determine whether or not such delays cause flight disruptions. Accordingly, the individual(s) typically analyzes a delay(s) to determine how the delay(s) affects scheduled flight times. For example, a flight arrival delay of thirty minutes for a particular flight may or may not cause a disruption to any other flights. In order to determine whether the flight arrival delay causes a disruption to another flight, the individual(s) at the operations center analyzes the flight arrival delay in relation to one or more other scheduled flights. The analysis includes all the scheduled resources for the delayed flight (such as the particular aircraft, flight and cabin crew, maintenance, passenger connections, airport catering, fuel, lavatory, baggage gate, slot time, cargo, etc.), as well as for the next use of each of those resources.
As can be appreciated, such complex disruption assessments may not be able to be conducted within a reasonable time to implement sufficient recovery action. That is, the analysis is typically labor intensive, and may take a relatively long period of time, thereby reducing a possibility for an alternate plan that could otherwise alleviate the disruption. There may be limited time available to implement a recovery action, and there may be multiple delays to be analyzed separately and/or together.
Moreover, by the time a determination is made, another delay may have occurred that negates the original analysis. In short, delays cannot be analyzed in isolation. Rather, the set of all active delays are continually analyzed by one or more individuals at a flight operations center, thereby yielding a complex, complicated, and time- and labor-intensive process.